Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Food professor Sylvain Charlebois has real-time grocery data for Canada Day weekend, and the news is mixed depending on what's on your grill. Ground beef, pork chops, and chicken breasts are all up this year. Strawberries and blueberries are more expensive, soft drinks are pricier thanks to aluminum costs, and potatoes are a little higher than last year. The bright spots: hamburger buns are cheape...

Cycling around the world qualifies for a Guinness World Record, and until recently the oldest person to hold it was 56. Mark Herbst looked at that number at age 69, decided it was beatable, and spent the next chapter of his life proving it across 35,000 kilometers and 25 countries, raising funds for Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in memory of his wife Jackie. Mark walks through what a legitimate...

Rod Black has been the voice in the room for Canadian sports fans for decades. Cut to Black is the book that explains how he got there, and it turns out it's not really about him. Rod is a TSN broadcaster and the author of Cut to Black: A Legendary Life in Sports, and this conversation covers the career behind the voice, from late-night sportscasts in Winnipeg with baseball cleats still on to the...

The show lands on Canada Day Eve with good news from three cities and a question worth sitting with: what if the most useful thing you can share today is something small? A first Colombian recipe attempt that smelled great. A bathroom renovation closing in on the finish line. A two-day work week that nobody asked for but everyone quietly needed. Then the cats versus dogs debate gets a full airing,...

The good news tonight comes in three flavors. A Phoenix school resource officer who rented a movie theater for kids who'd never been, then turned to the adults in the room and asked why they weren't doing the same. A dog named Daisy who walked out of a crash in BC's Okanagan, spent three days alone in the woods, and went back to the wreck to wait. And Larry the cat, who has outlasted another Briti...

Thirty percent of people don't like cats. Only five percent feel that way about dogs. Rod Phillips has spent years figuring out why, and the answer goes back further than most people expect. Phillips, a historian at Carleton University and author of Cats: A History, makes the case that cats haven't changed in thousands of years. What changed is what people decided they meant. The Middle Ages turne...

In Newfoundland, Canada Day doesn't begin with fireworks. It begins with Memorial Day and the memory of a generation of young men sent over the top at Beaumont-Hamel, France, one hundred and ten years ago tomorrow. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment numbered eight hundred going in. The field between the trenches was maybe three hundred meters wide. Most of them never made it across. This conversation...

Film critic Richard Crouse builds a Canada Day weekend watch list from the ground up: three Canadian films, each with a drink to match. Goon pairs with a Bloody Caesar, invented in Calgary in 1969 and consumed by Canadians over 400 million times a year. Richard walks through the recipe and the history, including why he draws the line at horseradish in the straw. A History of Violence, David Cronen...

A psychologist makes the case that the highs and lows of being a sports fan are not just entertainment, they are doing real work for your mental health. The conversation traces what happens physiologically when a game gets tense, why grief and joy need each other to feel like anything at all, and why losing as a fan might matter just as much as winning. From there the discussion turns to the line...

Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders are live and the box is real, but open it and there's only a download code. No disc. No trade-in value. No physical copy. Ever. A tech columnist who argued against this exact model with a Microsoft Xbox executive twenty years ago breaks down why it's finally happening, what the auto-renewing subscription buried in the fine print actually costs, and why gaming companie...

This conversation starts with Mark Carney admitting his own emissions targets will be missed and uses it as a way into a bigger pattern: decisions on 24 Sussex Drive and a submarine fleet contract that sat untouched since 2017 are finally getting made after years of avoidance. The question driving the discussion is what changed, and what it reveals about the leaders who came before him. The second...

When Canada advanced further than anyone expected, one family decided the only response was to follow the team to Houston, no matter what it took to get there. The plan: resell tickets to a USA match in Seattle, lean on Mom's credit card for the upfront cost, and hope it all balances out before Saturday's round of sixteen game against Morocco. This is less a soccer recap than a story about the len...

What makes a good party is a question most people think they already know the answer to. This conversation suggests they don't. From flood warnings in Calgary to a Cuban pig roast in a small Ontario village, the night shift checks in coast to coast on a summer that is swinging between sticky and soaked. The pig roast wasn't decorated. It wasn't curated. A neighbour named Orlando wheeled out a coal...

Home maintenance tips that actually save money this summer start with knowing where your house is leaking money without you realising it. Andy Barrar of Handy Andy Media walks through the gaps that are quietly wrecking your cooling bill and the gaps you should never fill if you want your deck to survive the seasons. The Gaps That Cost You A stick of incense is all it takes to find the air leaks ar...

Moving in together has a moment nobody warns you about. It's not the argument or the negotiation. It's a glance at a bookshelf. Ryan O'Donnell spotted that moment on Laura's face during unpacking, and everything that followed is a more honest account of cohabitation than most people will admit to out loud. Ryan had filled his living space with decades of Lego. A Star Destroyer. A castle. Twelve Ba...

Federal housing policy rarely produces a clean answer, and the BC condo buyback program is no exception. The Monday study panel works through what the numbers actually mean: ten percent federal funding, ninety percent BC, and units that still price out the people the program claims to help. The Bailout Question Jimmy Zoubris flags the political optics for a Conservative party historically opposed...

Canada missile defence has officially moved from background concern to stated priority. The Chief of Defence Staff named Russian missile technology as the country's biggest threat, and Richard Shimooka, military expert and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, breaks down what that actually means for a country with more Arctic territory to defend than budget to defend it with. Russia s...

Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch join Date Night to untangle why so many people are surrounded by love and still feel lonely. The problem isn't that love isn't there. It's that most people are busy performing it instead of building it. Jen has been watching a specific kind of video go viral — women showing the Cartier bracelet, the birthday flowers, the champagne toast, then revealing what was ac...

Simon Fraser University just received a $40 million donation from the Stevens family to support its new medical school, opening this August. Erin Morantz, SFU's Vice-President of Advancement and Alumni Engagement, joins to explain what a gift that size actually does — and why the name on the building is the smallest part of the story. The Stevens family has been part of the SFU community for...

Vacation budgeting tips are easy to find and hard to follow, especially when the flights are already paid and the costs keep creeping up anyway. Anita Bruinsma of Clarity on Your Money works through what actually happens when the excitement of booking a trip collides with the reality of what it costs to be there, and why the regret that hits on the drive home is almost always preventable. The fix...

Canada is the ninth largest economy in the world and a senior member of the G7. Andrew Caddell thinks it's time the country started acting like it, on trade and on the question of where its prime minister actually lives. Andrew brings a diplomat's eye to two stories that look unrelated but aren't. On trade, he reads Carney's refusal to accept a rushed deal as a negotiating strength, not a stalemat...

Nobody needed any of this information. That's exactly why it's here. A cookie chain put a Nanaimo bar on their menu and filmed Americans trying to say the word. The mayor of Nanaimo has opinions about this. Europeans attending the FIFA World Cup are discovering ranch dressing for the first time and cannot stop talking about it. Scientists in Australia have identified a new species of shark that ca...

This week's picks come with a warning: if you bought any of them digitally, you might not have them as long as you think. Steve Stebbing has 4,100 movies on physical media and has been laughing off the "just go digital" advice for years. PlayStation just deleted 500 purchased films from users' libraries, Terminator 2 among them, with no refund and no recourse. Steve, Ryan, and Shane work through w...

There's a six-year gap between when relationship problems start and when most couples finally ask for help. Dr. Laurie Betito has spent a career on the other side of that gap, and she wants to close it. Dr. Laurie is a Montreal-based clinical psychologist and relationship expert, and this conversation goes after the reasons people wait: the fear of what therapy might uncover, the stigma of needing...

AI and kids in Canada is no longer a future problem. Mohit Rajhans says the rules are already changing, most parents don't know it yet, and the confusion isn't a sign something's gone wrong. It's the whole situation. The vomit of change: a volume and velocity of shifts in policy, platform, and capability that arrives whether you're ready or not, with no manual and no single place to go for answers...